Hot on the heels of LTHSP2 "Backwards Compatible" comes the sequel "Forwards Compatible", only seven years later!

Basically I made this about three years ago now, and never got around to really finishing it up in a way I was happy with. Still, it's playable from start to finish, and has a couple of moments I think are kinda neat.

It's a rubicon-themed map, like LTHSP2, with a couple of twists. There's a .lit file for those that like them, I like to consider the lighting "quite tasteful" as coloured lighting goes, though replaying it it obvious that the lighting could have been a bit more moody.

Anyway, the .map and .qc source are included, so feel free to fiddle with it.

Using AguiRe's latest glquake, I successfully load up the map, but after walking maybe a few steps I get a console error saying "PR_EnterFunction: Stack overflow (256, max = 255) host error: program error" and the map closes. Not sure what to make of it.

Seeing people having problems getting it to run as well as the presence of a dpextensions.qc, I played it in DP right away and it worked. (I also got a crash once, when trying to noclip). Unfortunately, the performance was fairly low - this is DP's fault, possibly because of the colored lighting.

The map itself was very nice. I liked the semi-nonlinear layout, the good use of colored lighting and the glass of course. Some areas were a bit too dark though. The doors could have been marked better too.
Good to see the light saber enforcers again, nice plants and reskinned monsters. I guess the balance is OK on skill 2 (the poor performance made it harder for me), except for the SK/fiend area which I of course entered without getting the nailgun first as recommended in the text. The SNG enforcer was too tough for me, in a dark room with low fps. I didn't find the secret and (thus?) missed 8 monsters.

Definitely a cool map, despite its "not properly finished" state which wasn't really evident. It had certain DOOM-vibe to it.

The problem appears to be happening when the game can't decide if you're moving or stationary, and so switches between standing and moving frames until the stack overflows. I have a tentative fix, where you replace the bit of code
if(!self.velocity_x && !self.velocity_y)
{
...
}

with
if(!self.velocity_x)
{
if(!self.velocity_y)
{
...
}
}

These two are logically equivalent but are not executed the same in the engine. The former code will test both conditions even if the first fails. The latter exits early if the first condition fails. Why one causes the crash and the other doesn't, I'm not sure. But you can download a progs with just that change from here:
http://people.pwf.cam.ac.uk/ajd70/progsfix.zip It seemed to help me, but I can't say it works for sure, as I don't quite understand what goes wrong.

Lots of nice touches in the map, like the wall mounted weapons and the grunts with biosuits on, really gave it a sense of place. Managed to blast through it without too much trouble, just about survived the silver key area safely, and got through with most of the kills, but without finding the secret. I didn't get access to hydroponics or the crew quarters, are both of them involved in the secret?

Hints:
-Create a maps folder and put the .bsp and .lit in there, heh.
-Try to run away from the spawnpoint at the beginning to avoid the crash.
-Kill every enemy you see, even if it is one you can easily avoid and could kill later on. You'll need it to proceed.
-Do not try to use the noclip function even if you don't actually noclip.

The SNG guy was evil indeed, even more because I couldn't get any "hit feedback" (playing Diablo at the moment and being stuck with some non-dying mofo there :P ).

It ran very badly in Darkplaces, a fine example that vis-blocking should not be ignored... (r_showtris 1 & r_showdisabledepthtest 1 is quite ugly.)

Took me nine minutes. I had no problems playing this with Fitzquake other than seeing bright blue textures instead of glass (I assume this is where I should have seen glass).
It played well but was maybe a bit too easy on medium. Maybe a few more tough combats and some more weapons would have done the trick. I didn't experience any major health losses until the SNG guy. Didn't die.

built with tjunctions enabled this time (it wasn't before)? Some old qbsps require option -tjunc. Otherwise there are red sparkles all over the map.

OMG, LTH!!

#42 posted by biff_debris. [24.159.177.80] on 2008/01/21 05:07:44

Holy crap, it's been forever! Ran the map with DP -- and while I did dig the lighting and all, I've got one niggle -- the lights at the back end of the lift tubes need to be clipped, as idiots like me tend to get stuck under them. Gonna have to play again to find the secret, but it's good Quakey fun, buddy. Please don't take so long before your next release.

Don't have DP and I don't think I have FQ either. Played this in Aquire's Quake (which I have for some reason, not sure why, I think it improved engine limits without having any extra stuff in, anyway I'm sure I needed it for some previous release). And I think the progs.whatever didn't work or something. I got normal Quake monsters and weapons and not much else.

I liked the coloured lightning and the skybox. The glass worked fine with joequake. There were many nice details like the wall mounted weapons, computer panels or the plant section. The layout was nice, complicated and it felt like a real place. The difficulty on skill 2 could be a bit higher. The red enforcer at the end had really bad aim. It was enough to stand one step below him and he couln't hit you. Also you could have marked the doors better.
Overall a nice map and I enjoed it a lot.

Played It

#49 posted by Scragbait [69.159.48.123] on 2008/01/23 03:40:15

I played through the original zip in Fitz and it crashed a lot but after replacing the progs with Preach's fix, the problem went away.

Not a bad map - played on skill 2 and it wasn't that hard (when it didn't crash pre patch).

I liked the gardens - very Unreal like - best leafy vegetation in a Quake map.

Some doors weren't obvious so I checked just about all panels. Coloured lighting was fine - Quake 2ish. Felt a bit non-linear which was good. No real setpieces but had that Rubicon vibe. Not sure if the glass was supposed to look like solid light blue but that's how it looked to me.

I got the secret by trick jumping (and I suck at that.) Is this the correct way?

A fine enough SP diversion. I remember LTH1 as being very hard by comparison.

Lots of cool stuff in this release: the glass, the new base baddies, the vegetation, the weapon models, etc. It still felt a bit short, though. I'd love to see a more expansive follow-up ;)

Two other things: the slime/sewer area seemed oddly placed - you went up from the first area to reach it - and the red nailgun guy at the end would always shoot the floor if I stood still. Maybe it was monster placement or a QC bug, I don't know.

BTW, a map in this style + Quoth 2 would positively rock!

Great job!

Finally Played It

#55 posted by gb [89.27.231.189] on 2008/01/27 05:01:40

I found it a bit confusing in the same way as JPL's Slime Refinery Complex. It's the amount of corridors, and the amount of niches that could be doors but aren't, which is probably in the textures.

The ammo closets were a good idea, really nice idea actually, but they could have been better marked. They looked just like all the other doors.

Reminded me a lot of the Quake2 jail levels, that one room with the walkway and a door on one end, a lift on the other seemed like a deja vu. The fiend cells also. It would have been nice if there had been items or secrets in the cells, anything. A reward.

At first I didn't kill the enforcer with the key, which confused me even more... I guess if you have monsters dropping keys, they should be minor bosses and they should be in the main trail of combat, or in a special location (the lab would have been the right place for this.) Why not give a message to the extent of "a monster has the key"?

The fiend on the examination table was a nice touch and sufficiently explained their presence, you could have expanded on this theme - larger cell blocks with different monsters.

The grunt/enforcer variations: They're good enough I guess. It's rather hard to imagine a base map without Quoth defenders/rocketeers or Hipnotic centroids nowadays, but I'm of course spoiled.

One thing I'd like to see in any base map would be civilians, like in Starcraft, that aren't armed and just give the impression that research is being done there. You would just have the option of mercilessly slaughtering them, or leaving them alone. That's something that Quake lacks. I think other FPS games have this.

I would have liked some more horde combat, too. There were traces of it like just after activating the two consoles, when the third door opens and monsters come out. I was expecting something more like "oh shit, now it's starting for real!" but the "army" was rather small. That would've been a good spot for a few dogs from all directions. What happened to dogs? I thought even the last man on earth would have a mutt by his side :-D dogs plz.

In general, more monsters would have been nice, in larger groups. Also, more 3D combat, like some enforcers on crates, others on a walkway, while dogs and grunts come at you from all sides.

A side effect of the limited monster choice was a lack of infighting, the lightsaber guys and normal enforcers just don't want to kill each other :-/

The SNG enforcer had a little too many HP compared to his comrades, much like early Quoth monsters.

Nice map though, glass didn't work for me, I liked the darkness in some areas, some rooms could have been taller/wider, no buttons? I must have shot most computers, would be nice if something happened... some areas, like the lab, the command centers and the final area were nice. The outside walkway, too.

I would have liked to see hydroponics and the main hangar...

Well. To sum it up, harder and more varied gameplay plz, and a clear route to follow with some optional sightseeing. Could.bsp does this rather nicely. Many people like nonlinear maps though.

One thing I'd like to see in any base map would be civilians, like in Starcraft, that aren't armed and just give the impression that research is being done there. You would just have the option of mercilessly slaughtering them, or leaving them alone. That's something that Quake lacks. I think other FPS games have this.

Xmen TC had this a little bit -- guys with clipboards looking at computers that you could kill.

pretty solid but unremarkable stuff. A few nice otuches as people have mentioned icnluding glass and new monsters and plantation.

Colored lighting is good but I played with and without and without could have definitely used better lighting. I know its meant to be played with colored lighting but a little more effort should have been made so that it looked good in regular quake too.

JPL

#59 posted by gb [89.27.214.198] on 2008/01/28 01:45:18

I like SRC after getting to know it, but in the beginning it was confusing to me. The early Bobs were rather tough, too and stifled the flow a bit.

But I like it as a map, I didn't mean to put it down. It was a map that needed to grow on me for some time. ;-)

The problem with recognizing doors has to do with custom textures, in idbase you immediately know a door when you see one, in rubicon not always, because not many maps use it. I didn't play Doom3 and thus the textures weren't immediately familiar.

I didn't took your comments as offense: don't worry :) I admit easily that be aware of what is a door, or not, is not that obvious in SRC, while there are colored trims around the SK/GK doors... I just took these comments as a "don't do that again" for next maps... but concerning interconnects, you will not be deceived... ;)

They use a different codebase. the ond one doesn't have the code that makes they key work (both the throw and the keep after use), and the new code doesn't have the yellow nail enforcers. There's also the issue of making the trigger_changelevel point correctly, but that's minor...

So I finally tried it. Died more than a few times, but eventually got to the end. Didn't get the secret, but was able to see what it was. The fiends were a fairly major battle. I think that the point could've been made with just 6 fiends instead of 10 (I played skill 1), and ammo is very tight to take them all down, even for a packrat like me.

End boss was a welcome reminder of his old maps, even though it was very tough, until I realised that you could stand in a place where you couldn't be shot, but could kill it easily. 600 health is a bit much for it, though, but as there's only one, it's not too bad. Was a little disappointing to not see the nail enforcers return, though...

nice map. Old-school mood and archicecture. Also the nonlinear layout was quite nice -- I think that may also qualify as old-school, becuase I don't remember playing a lot of newer maps that were this open.

The finale was fairly easy compared to the previous map I played (with 4 SNG guys in a big room.)

-1 and possibly all negative values are meant to make the object entirely invisible and unrendered. 0 has to default to 1 so that all the entities are visible by default. I reckon that the more intuitive way of doing it would have been to just flip the direction of the alpha scale, so .alpha stores (1 - rendering_alpha), with 0 being fully visible and 1 being fully transparent. But the engines have a standard now, and this is it.

...and 0 = fully transparent and 1 = opaque, for the key ".alpha". I am pleased to hear that FitzQuake will be supporting alpha for brushmodels!! I might actually put some glass into my maps now ;-P
Also, will you be able to have transparent enemies? I thought this would be cool - using progs hacks I could have a extra-tough semi-transparent glowing scrag for example.... You could implement ghosts into levels n' stuff!

Transparent enemies will only appear transparent in engines that support it...

But assuming it does, just set "alpha" to some number below 1 (start with 0.5 and see how that looks) to make the monster transparent. Some models will look better than others. Same trick also works on items, if you want to be mean...

...I was kinda meaning "Will you able to have transparent enemies" - in FitzQuake now?
Also, for engines that do support alpha, isnt it ".alpha", with a stop? I heard this somewhere I think. Anyone who knows care to confirm, so we're all on the same page here?
(Ha: "Ricky - go and check the documentation")
:-P

And as I remember if alpha can be applied to func's then it can be applied to entities as well, including monsters. I did it in my first map with a Vore that teleports in, smashing a wooden structure.

Problem was I had Gaunts in the map who can teleport to close with the player to any available point, with info_teleport_destination being top of their list. A messed with it a bit until the bbox of the Vore would smash the structure but the smaller Gaunt's wouldn't.

Kept the combat interesting though, since the player couldn't just leave all the enemies behind.

Keyvalues of an entity in a map correspond to fields of entities in the qc code. When referred to in the qc, it's called .alpha to make it clear that it is a field. The usage would go something like self.alpha = 0.5; for making the current entity called "self" have an alpha value of 0.5. But for the map keyvalue, you would simply use
"alpha" "0.5"

The same could be said of any of the standard fields, targetname is thought of as .targetname within the qc code, but as a keyvalue is just "targetname". alpha is probably mentioned as .alpha all the time because it's usually discussed by coders, who tend to think of it in terms of the qc definition. It also helps to make it clear that you are specifically talking about the per-entity field .alpha, and not the idea of alpha in a more general sense, where it can be applied to particle effects, water rendering, alpha channels on sprites, etc...

yeah, the plan is for alpha support in the next version of fitzquake. As for what it works on, theoretically it can be applied to any entity in the map file, with the exception of worldspawn. In practice, some engines only support it on some types of entity.

For example, I haven't added support to sprites yet, or static entities, or sky-textured polygons.